Youth from SA and Swazi talk digital
The Good Work Foundation (GWF) recently reached an exciting milestone, when it hosted its first ever bilateral youth conference at the Hazyview Digital Learning Campus.
Titled Education, technology and conservation: a rural convergency, the Good Work Foundation (GWF) held their first bilateral youth conference, in collaboration with the US embassies of South Africa and Swaziland.
It aimed getting young Africans thinking about the possibilities of educational technology and efforts in conservation and how these two could converge.
It consisted of a two-day workshop which was attended by delegates from GeneratioNext Mamelodi and Soshanguve (Pretoria), GeneratioNext Swaziland and GWF’s Madlala Digital Learning Campus and included discussions on blended learning, drone technology and ideas for incorporating conservation into the syllabus of rural, low-income South African schools.
The programme included observing GWF’s Open Learning programme, which allows local primary schools to outsource elements of their digital, mathematics and English learning to the Hazyview campus.
After one session in the Open Learning Academy, Bonolo Cebe, the Cultural Affairs Specialist of the US Embassey tweeted: “I’m being schooled by grade 4s on how to fly an aeroplane. Tech has made so much possible.”
Most of the delegates agreed that the digital age allowed curriculums to be more creative and flexible, but that a lack of digitally trained teachers is restricting a revolution. “Tomorrow’s digital. We need more academic excellence workshops for teachers,” a delegate remarked.
The workshop was concluded with a game drive in the Kruger National Park, which only five of the 30 delegates had ever visited.
At the Hazyview Campus, GWF provides digital and English learning to rural school-leavers and primary school students in grade four and five.
A Conservation Academy was recently added to the organisation’s offerings. It is aimed at emotionally connecting rural South Africans to the natural beauty of our planet and a future in which they are participants in the economy of wildlife, specifically one in which the “silicon bushveld” is supporting conservation.
“We can use technology to engage and educate South Africans about the natural world” said GWF CEO, Kate Groch, “and we can also use technology to monitor and protect the natural world. At our campus of the future in Hazyview, we are interested in doing both.”
GWF’s Conservation Academy, powered by Konica Minolta South Africa and in partnership with the SanParks “Kids in Parks” programme, will take 40 rural schoolchildren into the Kruger National Park per week in 2016.
In addition to a digital learning experience that focuses on mathematics and English, each one of those children will have already spent a year at GWF’s Open Learning Academy engaging with conservation apps and videos. The programme currently reaches 3 000 schoolchildren in Mpumalanga per week.
